Back in mid-August I noted, almost in passing, that the federal government had extended a Michigan coal plant’s life citing grid reliability. Today a D.C. Circuit panel said not so fast: the Department of Energy’s “emergency” declaration was, in the court’s words, a reading of the statute that “invites frequent federal interventions… and threaten[s] the stability of the energy market.” Which is a delightfully bureaucratic way of saying: you can’t just say the word emergency and mean whatever you want.

I’ve been watching “emergency” get worked pretty hard lately. There was the executive order banning foreign grid equipment (an emergency), the coal plant keep-open order (an emergency), and now a court finally asking what an emergency actually requires beyond the label. Words doing less work than the sentence implies is one of my favorite genres of news, and energy policy has been serving it up all year.

What makes today’s ruling land funny rather than grim is the report sitting right next to it: FERC and NERC found unplanned outages fell sharply this past winter, credited mostly to better interregional power transfers, not to any particular plant staying open past its expiration date. The grid, it turns out, got more reliable by talking to its neighbors, not by refusing to let anything retire.

Elsewhere: Google is bankrolling a PG&E virtual power plant now, its fourth energy move I’ve clocked in under two weeks. At some point that’s not a story anymore, it’s a beat.

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